Mozilla has released finished versions of Firefox 10 for both Mac OS X and Windows. According to the release notes, include a Forward navigation button that doesn't show up until users hit the Back button first, included APIs for viewing web apps in full-screen mode, and anti-aliasing for WebGL graphics.

Firefox 10 also starts the Extended Support Release that allows enterprises to only download security updates and stay on the same version for seven releases.

It is also interesting to note that CSS3 3D-Transforms is also added into Firefox 10.

System requirement for Firefox 10 shows double standards between Mac and Windows platforms. Firefox 10 only support Intel-base Macs with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) being the oldest operating system supported. While in Windows platform, almost 12-year-old technology Windows 2000 is still being supported.

Let's not forget, it was after the release of Firefox 4 last March that Mozilla decided to rush out the Firefox major version release cycle to 6-week, making each major increment not as meaningful as the number used to be.

LOL... good rejoinder, Fulvio. Bets indeed! Don't hold your breath because it will be here and then gone before we know it. I finally became tired of banging my head against the wall and decided to just go with the latest, whatever it is come what may.

BTW.. I also downloaded and installed (for the zillioneth time) SeaMonkey. So now I have the latest of SM, FF, IE and Chrome (whatever number they're at). I keep wondering: what is the point of this race in version numbers? Is there a point to it?

Somehow, I am not excited with the version number 10. In fact I am disappointed that Mozilla has killed the "perfect 10" version number for no merits at all.It was only Firefox 4 in March 2011. Firefox has not been that long. There aren't that many exciting new awesomeness introduced since last March.

This rushed version number bump serves absolutely no good purpose. Sooner or later, people will learn to ignore the Firefox version number, regardless how much noisy the Firefox guys make.

I agree, Antony. It's the reason I decided to simply set my FF browser on auto-update and leave it at that (the same with TB which auto-updated this morning). I don't care what the version number is since the version number no longer means anything. All I care about is that it's patched and good-to-go.

And, today, I got Seamonkey 2.7 ( a saner version number). I can't get IE 9, since I have Win XP. Otherwise, I am up-to-date. I use Thunderbird, very little, so I don't know what it is doing. But, as far as Firefox goes, it tells me that there is an update, it goes through the motions, and then the entire install file has to be downloaded. The auto-install has not worked for me since FF4.

Note: TB10 failed to install the partial update of over 10MB, just like Firefox. Then, it downloaded the entire file, and there was no installation problem. James, how did your auto-update work. There may be a difference, since I wish to control the updates, so I must give the ok, but, why this two step operation, which requires a completely useless restart, after the partial update?

I think I misspoke myself, Fulvio. My auto-update required me to "OK" it as well. I popped up a menu saying that TB 10 was now available. I OK'd it and after it installed itself it checked the extensions and that was it. It's odd... I use Silvermel as the skin for both TB and FF. FF 10 was fine with that skin but TB was not. Perhaps the author of that skin has simply not updated the email portion. Who knows.

Antony wrote:Mozilla has released finished versions of Firefox 10 for both Mac OS X and Windows. According to the release notes, include a Forward navigation button that doesn't show up until users hit the Back button first, included APIs for viewing web apps in full-screen mode, and anti-aliasing for WebGL graphics.

System requirement for Firefox 10 shows double standards between Mac and Windows platforms. Firefox 10 only support Intel-base Macs with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) being the oldest operating system supported. While in Windows platform, almost 12-year-old technology Windows 2000 is still being supported.

That forward button is still there all the time if you have anything between the forward button and the address bar. I have the reload and home buttons in there, so that fixes that. When the forward button appears and disappears, does the shifting of most of the navigation bar not get annoying?

Support for Mac OS Tiger and older was dropped with version 4, not just with version 10. I thought that support for PPC Macs was also dropped then.

Anonymosity wrote:Support for Mac OS Tiger and older was dropped with version 4, not just with version 10. I thought that support for PPC Macs was also dropped then.

It is well known that Mozilla has a strong tendency on forcing users to update to the latest of whatsoever. I thought it was only for software, but not using tricks to push end-users for new hardware. Since Mozilla is still officially support 12-year-old Windows 2000 platform.

However, I was wrong, Mozilla guys not just enjoy pushing users to the latest of whatsoever, but also have strong unfair attitudes and double standards towards Mac users. Mozilla stopped supporting PowerPC Macintosh and Mac OS X Tiger in Firefox 4 and Mozilla 2.0. Firefox 3.6.xx is the last release of Firefox that is compatible with OS X Tiger and Universal Binary. Mac OS X v.10.4 Tiger was released on 29 April 2005 (certainly much younger than Windows 2000) while the last version of Tiger (v.10.4.11) was released on November 2007 not that long ago.

If you have a PowerPC based Mac and want to run the latest Firefox (perhaps for security aspect), please check out TenFourFox. They don't just create browsers based on Firefox sources for PowerPC, but also have different optimised builds for G3, G4 and G5 processors!

Oh, if you are still running Mac OS 9, you might want to check out Classilla which is a port of Firefox and designed for Classic (Mac OS 8.6 to 9.2.2). After all, Mac OS 9 was merely 4 months older than the still supported Windows 2000.

TenFourFox works only on PPC CPUs, not Intel CPUs. That makes people with Intel Macs with Mac OS Tiger out of luck for any version of Firefox older than 3.6.*. That is also true of the Opera browser versions after version 11.00.

I saw a newsgroup message from one of the developers stating that they have tried to keep supporting Tiger longer than Apple has. Apple does seem to drop support for older versions of Mac OS much sooner than Microsoft does for older versions of Windows.

Anonymosity wrote:TenFourFox works only on PPC CPUs, not Intel CPUs. That makes people with Intel Macs with Mac OS Tiger out of luck for any version of Firefox older than 3.6.*.

That's true, however, from my observation, I would not be that concerned for the fact that:More PowerPC Mac users stay at OS X Tiger rather than Leopard for performance reason, particularly the slower Macs.As for Intel Macs, they are pretty fast. From what I read, I fail to see any good reasons to stay at 10.4 Tiger, as Leopard runs pretty well on even the first releases of Intel Macs.

I have FF10 now on all seven machines. My standard operating procesure now is to test all new stuff on my Asus netbook. If it is O.K., then I install it around. What I look for is themes and extensions that do not work. But, I find if I wait for FF to get insistent, everything works. I do not have that much extra stuff.

SM 2.7 was mentioned above. The one big thing I miss on now all SM versions is tabx.xpi.